Monday, October 11, 2010

In 1995 the Whitney Museum held a retrospective on the work of Edward Hopper. I must have attended the exhibit a dozen times. One of my favorite paintings of Hopper's, Early Sunday Morning, can still be seen at the Whitney, and it was there then, too.

I remember standing at this painting with a docent who described the shadowy block in the upper-right corner, how it symbolized a high-rise encroaching on these little brick buildings. It meant a dark future was coming and the world of these sun-drenched bricks would vanish.

Sometimes, I find myself unconsciously repeating Hopper's composition in snapshots--the pairing of low-rise brick buildings, sunny and warm, blushing in the light, with a cold monolith encroaching, upper right. This isn't hard to do. The image is everywhere.

13 comments:

Hopper's work has become increasingly important to me as I've gotten older. I'd rank 'Early Sunday Morning' as probably my favorite painting of all time.

As far as the dark form representing an encroaching gentrification, or representing anything, non-painters often forget that forms are present to create an interesting composition and grnerally aren't symbolic of anything at all.

good point. maybe 2 story buildings were around. i will research. actually the more i look @that painting the more i do NOT see a sky scraper. i see the side of a 3 or 4 story older building. that makes me feel better.

I'd also wager it's a simple compositional device rather than anything else. If you remove the background building you are left with a very flat painting with horizontal stripes - the street, the buildings, the sky.

Inserting the background building creates the necessary depth our eyes require; locating it anywhere else in the painting would draw attention to it rather than the shops, so it's pushed off to the side.

It's entirely possible the background building didn't even exist and he threw it in there to make the space work - any good painter would probably do the same.